I hope we create whalegemma (similar to dolphingemma) so we can explain to them how to co-exist better with humans (e.g. avoid this area during their whale hunting season, travel to this area if you get sick or tangled in rope).
The same goes for most of our ecological problems, really.
You must be in your territory, defending it daily from others. You must live knowing the cat sleeps 50 feet away.
Future dangers must be misty, put out of mind, lest you become paralyized with fear and inaction. To be concerned for unimmediate danger, is impossible.
We are descended from such.
Humans have a very limited capacity to be concerned too far in the future. And think, if we were, how the probabilities expand that danger the further out you go.
Then also understand that the average IQ is 100, and consider how many are below that.
So, as a chipmunk do you work diligently collecting nuts for your winter, and your family? Or do you give up some nuts for a future that is misty, distant, opaque?
Don't be too hard on people, they're only human. They're only, really, chipmunks with bigger brains. And many are trying.
And the premise is the same. If you could empathize with every person, very directly, you'd be immensely depressed. Imagine if you could literally feel the pain of every human in agony. Heck, imagine if you could feel the pain of every being in the universe. How would you not sink into a deep depression? How would you not fear every move you make?
If you felt every person dying this minute in a car crash, would you ever climb in a car? Would you even leave your house, if you felt every person who tripped and fell on stairs?
Danger must be diffuse. Empathy must exist, but also must have bounds. Just as we must be aware of the future (store food for the winter), and cannot let that drive be interfered with by distant, non-crystallized danger from the future, we cannot let empathy overwhelm our capacity to empathize beings in our immediate mental space.
By the way, this isn't saying we don't need to act. We do. However, understanding the motives behind how people behave, why they do so, and what drives them is important.
And this behaviour is quite important still. We have a massive industry around farming, for example, canning, this sort of thing. However with the further and further collapse of international shipping, and with the US withdrawing (over the last 20 years) from patrolling the world's waterways for free, shipping danger is slowly increasing as time goes on.
And of course shipping is a larger and larger concern in terms of environmental impact. Ships currently use the dirtiest, foulest, most horrid oil you can find. We've already switched to cleaning that up a bit (with perhaps unforeseen outcomes), but the entire concept of shipping massive quantities of "stuff" around is somewhat silly from an energy and environmental concern.
So we're going to slowly be moving back to local first, and that means canned food. Frozen food, such as vegetables, isn't tenable if you have to freeze them in August, and keep them frozen until June next year, at first crop.
We already have a lot of canned food, but my point is, the concept of 'manage your own food supply' is going to be a growing concern. And there was a time, a mere 100+ years ago, where most of the planet had to can their own food, and if a community ran out? Well, that was it, there was nothing to eat.
My point is, the concept of immediate danger must always supersede distant/diffuse danger.
Keep that in mind, and a lot more traction can be had.
Does it solve all the problems? No. But if you know the why of a thing, you're closer to solving the thing.
> "Don't go to these places—even though you want to, even though your family has been breeding there for generations—because that's our special whale hunting area"
And that their behaviour would change for us, that their response would simply be:
> "No worries, thanks for the heads up! Sorry for getting in the way of your harpoons"
>There is a federal law that prohibits people from communicating with dolphins.
>It’s called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the federal law was created to protect marine mammals from being hunted, harassed, captured or killed.
>In a sense, talking to or communicating with dolphins could qualify as harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
>There are two levels of harassment, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harassment at one level is considered “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
>On another level, harassment is defined by the NOAA as “acts having the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”